Reportapalooza Reporting Remix – Journeys of a Thousand Steps Always Start With The First One

SAP’s Reportapalooza heads into the home stretch with three final events between now and Thanksgiving. The meat of this blog will deal with the final challenge, the Reporting Remix in which I and the other experts are blogging about our stepping outside of our comfort zone to learn about an SAP Crystal Solutions product with which we are not yet familiar. I have selected SAP Crystal Interactive Analysis Desktop Edition.

But before I get to that, however, there are a couple other things to tell you about. First, there is a week left for you to show up the experts. Reportapaloozainvites you to build a better dashboard or produce a better Crystal Reports tutorial video. If you think you can do us experts one better, take your best shot! You could even win a Zune MP3 player, but don’t wait too long – submissions will only be accepted through November 5th. After that, the voting begins.

Second, Reportapalooza is opening up the phone lines and giving you a backstage pass to the Behind the Reports Webinar. On November 10th at 2pm EDT, all five reporting experts will come together to answer your questions and tell you some behind the scenes stories. Come join the party as we jam it out online!

And now, here’s the main event. Have you ever been asked for a tool that would allow a customer or manager to be hands on with their business information? They don’t want to wait for a report request to be completed and dashboards are too constrictive. With SAP Crystal Interactive Analysis, you can view standard reports, perform ad hoc queries and create new interactive reports to give users intuitive access to their business information.

At least that’s what the marketing copy says. I have never used SAP Crystal Interactive Analysis. I had never even heard of it before, but admittedly my focus over the last decade has been purely Crystal Reports. So I am going to look at this from the perspective of a beginner: How intuitive is it to learn? How easy is it to start producing a useful analysis of business information? Is this something I need to add, along with SAP Crystal Dashboards, to my reporting repertoire? What kind of business information stories can you tell with this tool?

I don’t have those answers yet but I hope to over the next few weeks and of course I will blog about it here. My first project this weekend will be to install the product and check out any tutorials and/or training examples. But I need your help. If you have used this tool, I want to hear from you about your experiences. And if you have questions about it that you would like me to answer, I want to hear from you too. If I can find the answers, I will add it to the blog reports.

So please post your SAP Crystal Interactive Analysis comments to this blog, tweet me at @David_Deitch, write on my Facebook wall at http://bit.ly/ciXH0T, look for my discussion thread in the Crystal Reports group on LinkedIn at http://linkd.in/bXu7pS or post to the Crystal Reports Users Group on Yahoo Groups at http://bit.ly/bW2YuN. This may be my reporting journey, but journeys shared are better than taken alone so if you’ve come this far, why not see it through to the end with me?

I hope you enjoyed this blog post and have been following Reportapalooza. If so, I would love to hear from you. If you want to find out more about me, Reportapaloozaor Crystal Reports, you can visit follow me on Twitter @David_Deitch, become my professional friend on Facebook (http://bit.ly/9HaNKj) or connect with me on LinkedIn (http://linkd.in/cBQzEv).

Finally, if you tweet about this blog (and please do), be sure to include the #Reportapalooza tag in your tweet and help us get the word out. This has been a long post, and if you have read this far (please let me know if you have), thank you. If you have visited the Reportapaloozaweb site (http://bit.ly/ajKAJF), thank you. And if you voted me in any of the challenges so far, THANK YOU.